The Making of CTF-Pipeline

[Bazzwano]

Hello Again everyone.

I have been away from the BU community for a while as I have been expanding my knowledge into other areas. I'm teaching myself how to make my own textures, materials and meshes for a custom level I am currently calling Pipeline.

This thread is just a starter to document my progress. Unlike stratus, I will be documenting allot, and now that my new KB takes the view port screen caps there should be allot more posted.

About this map: The map will be of a small to medium size with a focus on detail (as with my previous levels). The level will offer some challenging routes that the player can use to attack and defend. I want the flag to be difficult to capture with opponents attempting to stop you from leaving the base, rather then lots of paths where you could make a sneak escape (BORING).

My Initial Ideas: Initially I imagine this map to be a dark and wet with a mix of Nature, old ruins, and a part industrial theme. The map will be withing a rocky canyon where a river flows through. There will be a sun on the horizon with a flair that shines through the cracks. No kismet events as yet.

I'm going to start with a step by step view of a material I have been working on for the floor. The red tile pattern was taken from the house next door






Level Development Overview
Layout: 70% Under Heavy Concept Development
Lighting: 80% Colour Picking
Meshing: 60% Under Development
BSP Materials: 80% Under Development
Level Construction: 1%
Kismet: 0%

For now if you could please refrain from posting unnecessarily as I would like viewers to be able to read through my posts consecutively.

Thanks for your support more will come soon.

[Ignotium]

... and here we go again...

best of luck bazzy

[Melvin]

This topic will be interesting to read, just like with Stratus.

[Jefe]

sorry to add another post to the count, but why don't you make several placeholder replies?

[acapulco]

I do like this! Really enjoyed your last thread. Questions -> PM, you know!
Build it in 3D and make a nice Normalmap for it. It will look alot better. Or did you do some for it?

Edit:
Congrats to your place in the MSUC!

[Mozi]

Pipeline eh... sound familiar

http://mozidesign.com/2008/03/15/making-of-mp_pipeline/

Just kidding, I don't own the name... plus that was for Gears.

[TurdDrive]

hope it just as good.

[Kantham]

That texture looks really great. Are you making this for a mod to enter MSUC Phase 4?

Originally Posted by Mozi

Pipeline eh... sound familiar

A lot of games has it, take COD4's Pipeline for instance. It's generic.

[Bazzwano]

Originally Posted by Ignotium

... and here we go again...

best of luck bazzy

Thanks Man

Originally Posted by Jefe

sorry to add another post to the count, but why don't you make several placeholder replies?

Meh don't worry about it, Id rather my posts correspond to the dates.

Originally Posted by acapulco

I do like this! Really enjoyed your last thread. Questions -> PM, you know!
Build it in 3D and make a nice Normalmap for it. It will look alot better. Or did you do some for it?
Edit:
Congrats to your place in the MSUC!

That's a good idea, but for materials I'm not putting on a mesh I would rather not waste all that time, I imagine it would take me a while :-s by the end of this I don't expect the player to see much BSP like my other levels . I definitely plan on sculpting though.

Anyway, I'm putting allot of effort into each and every element.
I had to paint in the height for that with a new layer before generating the normal, to give me the height, I then combined that normal with another without this new layer. see it below.


Pretty good normals if i do say so myself The bump map was done the same way.

Originally Posted by Mozi

Pipeline eh... sound familiar

http://mozidesign.com/2008/03/15/making-of-mp_pipeline/

Just kidding, I don't own the name... plus that was for Gears.

I knew it sounded familiar too, I goggled it and found nothing :-s but who knows I may change the name.

[acapulco]

Yeah, that looks good, no word! For my next map i started preproduction a few weeks ago and I will create every single bit in 3d.
First of all for the things I will learn with it and second it'll be easy going when I have some stuff on the first hand. Make som 6 or 10 different bricks, decos and stuff and you can varry a lot with those. Special things will be modelled uniquely. I will get faster by just doing it.
For texturing I create some simple basematerials and stuff them over. Unique things will be treated different, clear. But a brick wall in a mesh will be filled pretty easy and fast. I will have to find a way to make it really look good in the outcome, so it doesn't look too random.

Your normal is btw a bit noisy for some plates lying on the ground. Those are more even on top and more noisy where you don't step on it. Erosion and stuff.

[Kantham]

Bazz, have you included alpha heights? Sounds like this could be an excellent solution for this particular material.

[Bazzwano]

Originally Posted by Kantham

That texture looks really great. Are you making this for a mod to enter MSUC Phase 4?

Thanks, but no its just another CTF map by me only this one is custom. Won't be ready for phase 4.

Originally Posted by Kantham

Bazz, have you included alpha heights? Sounds like this could be an excellent solution for this particular material.

Yes there are alpha heights, which I’m going to call a height map texture, so I made this Texture for the Bump map. It works VERY well.. I wish I could make a quick movie to show it off, but I have never used that kind of software (fraps I assume)



I must admit progress is a bit slow, life is very busy these days. Plus I’m still in the process of learning and most importantly learning the best way to go about making a particular mesh.

Below is what is going to be brick steps, I thought I should start with one solid mesh and sculpt the shape.



That was taking a long time and I wasn’t getting the look I wanted. So I made a series of bricks and exported them into mudbox where I sculpted them, the result was much more what I was looking for, and being able to hide bricks helped allot with the performance of my PC.



I then export the lot back into MAX where I Instance a second set and move them around. I will then make a low poly mesh and layout the UVs and Texture in more details.



Here Is a simple Mesh with a material I made applied to it giving the effect of a complex set of leaves.



As you can see I’m developing these allot as I go on consistently making improvements.

[acapulco]

Get a greenish basecolor on your diffuse for those leaves, else you will always have a white line around it.

Allways stay on grid! Never forget. Just to remember!

[Bazzwano]

Originally Posted by acapulco

Get a greenish basecolor on your diffuse for those leaves, else you will always have a white line around it.

Allways stay on grid! Never forget. Just to remember!

I did (But now i know why), and I know This Image is of the older mesh by the way.

[Larkin]

That all looks very nice Bazz. I specially like the leaves on the last mesh. Did you copy real plant leaves for that? It looks really familiar.

[Bazzwano]

yes real plant leaf, its much faster taking photos then it is painting them and the Tile pattern on my tile material was taken outside the garage of the house next door haha it may look familiar because I used a similar technique to DM-Worm

Update:

Best I use this post rather then a new one. SO After importing the high poly bricks from mudbox back into MAX and duplicating them I ended up with a 8million polygon model. I them exported from mudbox a version taken from the lowest subdivision level and arranged them in max the same way.

I then optimized these bricks even further and then crated a basic base object which I then merged with the Low poly bricks with a union Boolean. seen below.


Using polygon cruncher I them reduced the amount of polys from around 4000 to 400. Because its only a trial version and about to expire I documents this process with a new found program called mesh lab which is VERY neat and FREE.


I then used MAX to "render to texture" which basically takes the detail from the high resolution version and prints it into the laid our normals for base textures. you can see the low poly version here in both MAX and unrealED with the Ambient occlusion texture map applied to it. The textures will then be edited in photoshop.

[stevelois]

Hey Bazz

Finally, my BU account is now working, after 4 registration attempts damn it. I wanted to post a little something for my preferred CTF mapper

Great stuff you made there Bazz

[Rask]

Bazzwano is on it again. I'll be reading this thread. Maybe I'll learn something awesome on the way. ;D

Good luck and keep posting!

[Bazzwano]

Originally Posted by stevelois

Hey Bazz

Finally, my BU account is now working, after 4 registration attempts damn it. I wanted to post a little something for my preferred CTF mapper

Great stuff you made there Bazz

Thanks Stevie, Welcome to my happy BU family

Time for an update. I have gotten a bit sick and Haven't have time to map. Finding time these days is difficult for a start.

But anyway. I have made a few more meshes and a new material which is more inline with the style I want so the first material may not have a place but we will see. anyway here it is. Step by step (some what)

Basically I grabbed my favorite brick texture and Cut out a couple of bricks and instanced them on a grid I have already place with grid lines. Unfortunately as you might see in the picture I foolishly merged the bricks with these guides :-s Cost me a bit of work.
I then applied another texture added some cracks and merged that with a blend mode. I then did the same with a red rock texture I had once again instanced to smooth it out and make it look old and weathered.

I then painted in the depth and cracks by hand and used the levels layer and lowered the saturation which is very important to use the full range for the lighting in unreal. I generated my normal with this depth and then removed these depth lines for the diffuse because you don't want the cracks to appear black when you have a light shining into it.






Ill now show some shots of all this in the editor. Remember I'm still working out what I require to make the level so there isn't much to take pictures of. I have a lot of work to do with pencil ( I will post my drawings later) These Images show my textured stairs and a brick pillar mesh I made which uses the same brick material. I'd like to point out that my meshes are all using light maps and not vertex lighting.



Lantern is a placeholder until I have modeled my own.

[HedgeMaster]

That's a proper use of engine possibilities. So far lighting looks great, but I'd like to see more or less complex scene with these details.